Slow River

“Mostly. But they’ve got some new hard-line government in power who want to throw away all international protocol and claim all foreign assets as their own, especially intellectual property.”

“But you fixed it?”

“I think so. We’ve formed a loose coalition with other corporations—especially publishers and the entertainment business, who get all their money from copyright—and we hope that the threat of massive sanctions will cool the new government’s ardor.”

The sun is almost setting. Lore picks up a piece of driftwood and throws it as far into the reddening sea as she can. “But if that doesn’t work you could always send in a couple of assassins, right?” she asks as they resume walking.

“Now there’s a nice thought. It would solve a lot of problems.”

Lore wipes sandy hands down her shorts. “Then why don’t you? I don’t mean actually kill people, but, you know, make sure that things don’t go quite right with, oh, I don’t know, the national power system or something.”

Oster laughs as they walk, and Lore laughs along with him at first, but then she gets more serious.

“Is it true? I mean, could you do that if you wanted?”

He stops, looks at her closely. “Where on earth did you get that idea?”

“Tok was telling me about Jerome’s old group.”

Oster looks nonplussed. “But that group was shut down years ago, in my mother’s day.”

“So it did exist?”

“Yes. But it doesn’t anymore, at least not in that form, anyhow. Now it’s a legitimate troubleshooting team.”

They walk on some more. A cormorant dives into a wave. “So why was it shut down in the first place?”

“It got out of hand.”

Lore, imagination running riot, pictures grim men and women with drawn guns. “I don’t suppose they liked that. Did they shoot anyone?”

Oster bursts out laughing. “Sometimes I forget you’re only twelve.” He ruffles her hair. She smoothes it back patiently. “Look, let’s sit down a minute.” They find an old, half-buried log and sit facing the sea. “The lubricant behind all corporate machinery is money. My mother didn’t have to use threats. She didn’t have to fire anyone. All she did was reduce the funding for the group and tighten their accounting methods. Illegal operations are very expensive: materiel is purchased on the black market, bribes have to be made in the right places, cleanup operations are time-consuming and delicate. They simply can’t work without lots of liquid cash. No funds, no operation. So those who missed the glamour days went away and found some other kind of work, and those who are left have the souls of accountants. All that double-dealing stuff is history.”

Lore feels relieved but vaguely disappointed.

Lore is almost thirteen. She has mulled over Tok’s advice for several months. For her thirteenth birthday she asks for, and gets, a camera and edit board. It is not hard to use: point the camera and record; slide the disk into the edit board, chop out sequences, and paste it back together to make whatever you wish. Despite herself, she becomes interested, soon exhausting the possibilities of one camera and one board and largely unaware subjects. She adds a storyboarder with basic library. Now she has thousands of faces and voices that she can dub in over those of her family.

Oster and Katerine think of her films as a diverting hobby, and after Lore has shown them deliberately inane clips, they do not ask her what she is up to. So when she asks for new library cards for her storyboarder, they smile indulgently and buy them, not asking what she is playing with. In this way, she obtains several adult libraries.

She starts with Tok’s subscriptions to art zines and parlays them into membership in all the online camera zines she can find, hanging silently in the net, soaking up all the tricks with camera, edit board, and storyboarder that professionals, enthusiastic amateurs, and self-labeled underground anarchists boast of to each other. She never leaves messages, never lets anyone know she has been there. She trades in one camera after another until she has a Hammex 20, with which she can make films as crisp and sophisticated as any net entertainment. She keeps learning and begins to enjoy her secret life.

She discovers that if she wanders the house and gardens with her camera, Katerine does not start conversations about bioremediation in Bangui or Luanda. If Oster starts talking about getting up before dawn to go game fishing, Lore casually mentions that she will be up most of the night, filming moonlight on water for her latest art documentary. Soon she carries the Hammex with her wherever she goes, but the films she makes are secret.

Her films are wish-fulfillment, for a while: Oster and Katerine eat romantic dinners together, kiss, hold hands, disappear smiling into the bedroom. Lore, whose body is beginning to wake, wonders how her parents look when they are in bed. She watches some of the standard pornography scenes from her library, then learns how to morph the faces of her parents onto the bodies of the library actors.